It's one of the reasons so many people are on her side, in spite of the fugitive's recent arrest.

Walsh is a woman with a past – a big one – and it finally caught up with her last week. The U.S. Marshal's Service busted her 32 years after she walked away from a Michigan prison, where Walsh served one year of a 10-to-20-year sentence for selling heroin in 1974.

Her arrest and pending extradition is stirring searing online debates. But more than that, it has awakened eternal questions about crime and punishment.

“This raises a much larger issue for a lot of us – the issue of redemption, and how do we achieve that?” said Larry Hinman, a University of San Diego philosophy professor and renowned ethicist.

Walsh is really Susan Marie LeFevre.

“I really wanted to keep this secret. I can't believe everyone knows this now,” LeFevre said yesterday during a phone interview from Las Colinas jail. “I have a very happy life here. I have a wonderful family, and I miss them very much.”

Pending a new court ruling, she would have to finish at least nine years of her sentence.

“Just because she escaped and evaded capture for 30 years doesn't mean your prison sentence sentence is negated,” said Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan.

Susan LeFevre (top) in her 1970s mugshot and after taking on a new identity as Marie Walsh (above) in a more recent photo.

The 53-year-old managed to hide her checkered past from her children and her husband, Alan Walsh, an executive at Waste Management.

“I've known my wife, Marie, for 23 years,” he said in a statement. “She is a person of the highest integrity and compassion. During that time she's been nothing but a caring and wonderful wife and mother. She has raised three beautiful children and worked hard to build a good life for them, and has dedicated her life to their well-being.

“Her family is now threatened to be destroyed.”

Gay Mason, who lives across the street, said, “I don't think anyone feels that it would be useful to society to lock her up back in prison.”

LeFevre's legal troubles date to 1974, when she sold about $200 worth of drugs to an undercover agent. She was 19.

“That was it, the only time I was ever arrested,” LeFevre said. “I was promised probation. . . . I was a stupid little John Lennon, hippie-ish girl. A pothead.”

Michigan authorities called LeFevre a major drug trafficker who ran a heroin operation that earned about $2,000 a week.

“She was not your average street peddler selling narcotics to an undercover officer,” Marlan said. “They thought she was a big player.”

Undercover officers bought from her at least twice and a search of her Saginaw apartment turned up $500 to $600, paraphernalia for cutting heroin and photos that showed she was acquainted with the “higher-ups” in the Saginaw drug world, Marlan said.

State police believed low-level dealers sold drugs for LeFevre.

She walked away from the Detroit House of Corrections in Plymouth, Mich., on the morning of Feb. 26, 1976, using a pass that allowed her to work at a clinic, Marlan said.

“There was always a big question as to where she was, but then when this happened, well, it surprises you after all these years,” her brother, David LeFevre, of Cass City, Mich., toldThe Saginaw News.

He said the family had heard occasional rumors about where she was but didn't know what to believe.

USD's Hinman said it's easy for people to feel so much empathy for LeFevre.

“It sounds like she's led a good life, maybe even an exemplary life since then, and we feel that should count for something,” he said. “And she was young when she committed these crimes . . . and what she did is not the same thing as shooting someone or stabbing someone.

“On some level, we want to believe our judgments are accurate because we can all imagine her as one of our neighbors. And if this is true, what does that say about our judgments about our neighbors? Could we be mistaken about them, too?”

LeFevre's Southern California life began to unravel in late March, when the Michigan Department of Corrections received an anonymous phone call suggesting LeFevre might be in California.

Authorities obtained a copy of Walsh's thumbprint from the California Department of Motor Vehicles and found it matched LeFevre's.

David Borden is the executive director of stopthedrugwar.org, an educational and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

“I can't blame someone at that age, facing that type of prison sentence, for walking away,” he said. “We say these drug laws are there to help the children, but when they turn 18 or 19 we'll throw their lives away for $600 worth of heroin.”